Songfacts®:

• This short piece performed by the company is the introductory number to Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street. Also known simply as Sweeney Todd, this is a musical cum opera with a score by Steven Sondheim that was also made into a film with Johnny Depp taking the lead roll. The film opened in the UK on January 25, 2008.
  
  The original Broadway production opened March 1, 1979 and closed June 29, 1980 after 558 Performances. It also ran in London and elsewhere.
• This macabre story that started life in an 1846 penny dreadful has been the subject of countless retellings in all media. Todd was a barber who murdered his patrons, slitting their throats from ear to ear, robbing their bodies, then for good measure, cut them up and had them made into meat pies which were sold by his partner-in-crime (and in some versions his lover) Mrs Lovett. It remains to be seen why anyone should find such a disgusting story of serial murder and depravity so fascinating, but countless millions throughout the world have and still do.
  
  The journalist Peter Haining (1940–2007) claimed to have found evidence that Sweeney Todd was a real person. In 2001, he won the Karl Edward Wagner Prize at The British Fantasy Awards, and his claims about the Demon Barber of Fleet Street belong firmly in the realms of fantasy. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Alexander Baron - London, England, for above 2